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If you are reading this, chances are you been banging your head against the wall for a couple of hours (or even days) trying to show excel files inside the WinForms webbrowser control. Possible reasons you ended up in here: You had working code that got broke after upgrading from Win 7. Your code doesn’t work the same way between machines running different (newer) versions of IE. A download box pops up every time your app tries to show an excel file inside the webbrowser control (you wanna show the actual content). You just have no clue on how to get excel working into the .NET embedded webbrowser control. You are trying to implement IInternetSecurityManager and don’t know where to start. (Or how don’t know how to delegate calls to your security manager). Among many other, maybe….. Yes, COM is a PITA, so is ActiveX and IE (Embedded or full for that matter). And no, showing excel files inside the webbrowser control shouldn’t be that hard, but sometimes we have to deal with what we have at ha…

Now, ruby doesn't have a specific type to say: this method (command) returns nothing, like void in C and other languages. So, the question is: How do you state that a particular method returns nothing?

Based on comments from the ruby mailing list, people are using these approaches;
1. Return self.
2. Return nil.
3. Implicit return (which in general, ends up being nil).

If I'd have to pick one, I'd go with the last one, but I also like to throw
another option into the mix....
Why don't create a class for this particular use case? Let's say, Nothing!

For a long time the .NET's unit testing landscape hasn't changed that much... sure, new frameworks arrived, but they were almost the same thing with a subtle syntax twist, instead using [Test] they use [Fact] or different ways to specify setups and so on, but the essence was the same... Attributes based libraries with GUI oriented test runners. There is nothing wrong with that perse, but I guess everybody would agree that they are hard to use if you are working on plaint text editor like vi or emacs. In this context, contest was born as an alternative to IDE oriented tools for those who prefer consoles and text editors. The way the art of programming was meant to be ;)
For an elevator pitch, please refer to this codeproject article.
For docs and getting started guides go the contest's repo on github.
And of course, if you have any question, fell free to contact me.

Command-T is one of
the most powerful Vim's plugins but install it on a Windows box
could be a bit of pain in the ass little frustrating
;). Here I'll post a
step by step guide on how to install this plugin from scratch. First of all, you
will need a copy of Vim compiled with ruby support (+ruby) which
ins't the case of the default version that you get from the official
site. While you can
compile Vim by yourself, you can also download an already compiled
version from here
http://wyw.dcweb.cn/download.asp?path=vim&file=gvim74.zip
(ruby 2.0) Once your download
completes, extract vim.exe and gvim.exe and copy them into
“C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\Vim74” Now, got to your
command prompt and run: vim –version. Among a bunch of stuff, you
should see +ruby. In addition to the
modified version of Vim, you will also have to install ruby 2.0. If
you haven't already, go to http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/
and download de x86 version of Ruby 2.0 and the according RubyDevKit.
(It…

Not so while ago If you had asked: Would you ever leave Visual Studio (+ReSharper and tools)?. The
answer would be: “Hell No!, Why on earth I'll leave the most
powerful IDE ever built?! But as the time goes by, I've changed my mind... Lately I been
working on Mac, Linux and Windows, doing .NET, JavaScript,
TypeScript, Ruby, HTML, CSS, some SQL and batch/shell scripts. Having
and editor that works (almost) the same way in all of these platforms
is a big win for me. Not to mention that I can code in any language I
want with out switching editors. Here is a short a
short list features that made me change my mind. * Cross platform
support. (Big one). * Lightweight. (When
in the road, your battery will last longer). * Fast as hell. You
won't be waiting for minutes to open solutions. * You can code in
any language you want. * Tiny footprint.
You don't need 8 GB of disk's space just to install the tool. * Already installed
on most Unix systems. Ok, that sounds
good. But which featu…

In
this short post I'll show you how to troubleshoot the error: E370:
Could not load library msvctr-ruby200.dll If
you had install Commant-T on Windows (the right way) and are seeing the afore mention
error, chances are you had installed the x64 version of Ruby 2.0 and
Ruby Dev Kit. I had made the same mistake (several times!), so no worries, you are just an easy fix away from fixit. Just uninstall the x64 version and install the
x86 one of both, Ruby and RubyDevKit. Once
you had installed the right version (platform wise), open vim
and run: :ruby
puts RUBY_VERSION.
You
shouldn't get any errors any everything should work as expected. Safety
checks: *
Verify the contents of C:\ruby200\bin (in there you should see
msvctr-ruby200.dll). *
Close all instances of cmd and run Vim from a fresh new one.

I've been long time user of the NUnit framework (I mean for ages) and I was quite happy with the overall experience. Good performance, lots of tests runners, great integration with Visual Studio, reasonable documentation, the list goes on and on... But lately I've been working mostly on mac and/or linux, and on that space, the experience wasn't that great.

I still advocate for TDD (and any kind of automated tests for that matter) but I have to admit that doing TDD with NUnit outside Visual Studio (and without ReSharper support) was quite tedious. While NUnit comes with a console runner, I guess it's there just for CI Servers and not for developers to use. I mean you can use it, but the output is xml... and ... should I say more? ;)

So with that problem at hand, I decided to write Contest, a small library that allows me to do TDD on .NET with just an editor and a console. Basic feature set but capable enough to get stuff done. And of course, easy to use from de console.